Word Of Mouse

mmm, well that seems like a while back - we´ve not made it for an Internet cafe session in a while. I have (it has come to light) a very limited ability to retain information or any kind of memories sequentially. Once in my head everything gets jumbled up and recategorised in a manner over which I seem to have lirttle control. Malc on the other hand can recall exactly which left turn we took before arriving where and in what order, a skill I can only describe as impressive.Anyway the point of that was to say that Malc has now gone to pick up a CD with our pics on and has left me to begin the log - a rather bold move on his part given the above. Still I had a little prioming so we´ll see how it goes...

We left Figueira Da Foz and set off for a long bridge that would save us miles on our journey south if only we were able to cross it. We made a long detour out of town on a route very much designed with motorised transport in mind, before curling back and onto the bridge, just managing to avoid joining the motorway and thankfully alos avoiding the traffic doing so.We´ve got a bit of a system at such junctions now, with me twisting round to see what´s behind calling out information to Malc and if and where possible making eye contact with any drivers that might be able to act in our favour. There are some advantages to tandem riding (apart from the obvious).
Anyway there was a pedestrian route over the bridge so we dismounted and heaved our luggage and then Bramble over the crash barriers and enjoyed a peaceful ride looking down on the remaining salt pans, that had once brought the town its wealth.
Once over teh bridge we set off at a lick. With the wind for once behind us we were unstoppable cruising up hills. We stopped for a woodland lunch and discovered we were not the first to pick the spot. The Portuguese seem to have limited concern in littering the countryside with the remains of their picnics or other less salubrious wastes. Sometimes these picnic remains are neatly bagged up and hanging in trees, perhaps waiting for the pixies to magic them away. It´s something that´s been quite upsetting, along with frequent fly-tipping spots, even in national park areas.
The afternoon´s road was another one of those cobbled affairs, which took the wind out of our sails a little and we arrrived in the unpromising smalll town of Vieira in need of a rest. We took the chance to have a drink and stock up on provisions, mostly bought from another in a chain of ´communist shops´these are invariably run by elderly womn whose degree of friendliness runs from both extremes and covers the full spectrum inbetween. The stock is more consistent, consistently limited that is. This particular shop did little to advertise itself and with it´s lights off it was no shock to me that once accustomed to the dim I saw a look of amazement on the shopkeeper´s face. She was a friendly enough charqcter and dealt at length with her other customer, chipping a lump of ice out of the freezer to treat her bruised lkeg ( a result of stumbling onto a sharp corner in the unlit shop). I was dealt with more quickly however, being immediately categorised as alien foreign person incapable of any form of communication so given silent service. I am much more in favour of people like the woman on the cheese counter in another such shop who explained with the aid of a photo and much sign language aboiut the death of her son and much more. OK it stretched my Portuguese to find a suitable response, but I think I managed to convey my sympathy without offence. Anyway, I got back to Malc and soon we were surrounded by a gang of young lads keen to know more about us and Bramble. They were great and a real lift at the end of a hard day´s cycling. One lad in particular was great value - he stood wide eyed and loose jawed in unabashed amazement as we explained we had cycled from England. I thought he might explode when we showed him how far it was on our little bike computer.
That night we camped in teh sand and teh mist on a very unpromising little campsite a short way out of town by the beach.
The next day we were hesitant to take the coast road, expectign more cobbles but were delighted to find a a huge smooth red cycle path.

Malc here. The cycle path was indeed amazingly smooth and a great relief to tired and sore bottoms from the previous day. The night's mist cleared by mid morning and a hot day beckoned, mercifully fairly flat, and it was also good to be able to see the sea, after the previous day's meandering through endless forest on cobbled roads. Passing through the small beach town of Sao Pedro de Moel, we stopped for lunch in another little patch of forest- almost, but not quite, clear of litter- then on to Nazare (an unremarkable tourist hole of large hotels and tour buses) and inland, ending at Caldas da Reinha after another long day in the saddle. It would have ended there anyway, except that infuriatingly this was yet another of those cases where the tent symbol printed on the map bore no relation to the actual position, or indeed existence, of the physical campsite. We tracked down the tourist office- this took a lot of doing, it was extremely well disguised with almost no external sign to betray its presence- and I went in to make inquiries. The woman behind the desk looked a bit startled- I was probably the first client they had in several weeks- but managed to convey to me the information that such camping as there was was several miles out of town, back out in the direction from which we had come (and with more than a touch of schadenfreude, it seemed to me). Nothing for it: back into the saddle we got, and made it as far as the campsite against the stiff northerly wind which, having been a welcome companion all day, now turned against us with full force.

The next day took us back through Caldas de Reinha, the fort town of Obidos and along inland roads to Torres Vedras. The road was a large and well maintained N-road, paralleled by a much newer autoroute that took the bulk of the traffic: in consequence it was a smooth and easy ride. The contrast, when we turned back towards the coast at Torres Vedras, was startling: suddenly we were on a much smaller road that seemed to be carrying far more traffic. The traffic was basically beach traffic, an endless stream of new cars and 4x4's passing in quick succession in both directions. The narrowness of the road meant it came alarmingly close, and to make matters worse, the side of the road was frequently in a very bad state. Things came to a head when, after a welcome downhill stretch, we were suddenly confronted by a very steep uphill section, at a time when we were both feeling very tired at the end of the day. We might nevertheless have made it, except that suddenly an enormous pothole loomed right in our path, of a size that would certainly have thrown us off had we entered it. I hit the brakes, the bike stopped dead because of the gradient, and before I could unclip my feet we were over and falling. Out into the traffic. Ali hit the road inches from the wheels of an overtaking 4x4, and we scrambled for safety as quickly as we could. I was shaking and unable to continue for some time: we pushed the bike up the rest of the hill, appalling visions of the catastrophe that might have been swimming before my eyes and haunting my thoughts that night. This was, in the almost 3000 miles we have done so far, the closest we have ever come to disaster.

Ericeira turned out to be a remarkably pleasant place, surrounded by tourist hotels but with an old heart that showed what the town used to be like before the property developers got their claws into it. We took a welcome day off here to recover our spirits, lying on the beach and wandering the cobbled streets.

We were now getting quite near to Lisbon, but the following day´s cycling took longer than expected and when we finally tracked down our campsite with the help of several friendly locals, we were still some thirteen km short. (It was a horrible campsite- no small tents at all, all caravans and motorhomes. The receptionist was rude and unhelpful to Ali. We pitched on a gravel coated patch of ground that turned out to smell strongly of stale dog excrement: it must have been where the denizens of the caravans walked their pooches). We left thankfully the following day towards Lisbon.

The ride down into Lisbon was surprisingly stress free. Stopping at a junction to read a map, a man came over to help us find the way. He was Jose Pires, a motorcycling policeman and embassy guard, who turned out to be absolutely passionate about cycling and Portugal's mountain bike champion in years gone by. He told us of his planned trip, for a couple of year's time, that will put ours well and truly into the shade: a 44,000 km spectacular going from Portugal to Beijing via "the northern route", dropping down to Australia, crossing that from one side to the other, up to Canada, down through the Americas to the southern tip of South America, across to South Africa and back to Portugal via the west coast of Africa. We wished him good luck, but had to decline his generous offer of a place to stay in Lisbon. He also turned out to have spent time in Mostar and Ali and he spent some time chatting about the fall of the bridge there and swimming exploits in the Neretva. As we talked, various of his colleagues passed, and were hailed with a cheery "hey, bandito!" His passion for bikes was obviously well known.

Jose gave us some advice for getting through Lisbon alive, which we appreciated, and did our best to follow. It nearly worked. However we did get lost at one point. From having been on a large dual carriageway, we turned off and went up a promising looking side road. It got thinner and thinner and eventually turned off downhill between two rows of partially derelict housing on the edge of the park, culminating in what appeared to be a dead end. We could see the roads we needed, below us, but separated from us by an impassable and steep bushy slope. A large man appeared from one of the houses in shorts and singlet, and came over. He turned out to be full of good humour and more importantly good advice- he pointed out the exact road we needed, and waved at some decaying steps round the side of one of the ruins. We set off with Bramble down the steps. Round the corner, it became clear that our path would take us over rubble piles, abandoned mattresses and broken glass: nevertheless Ali, scouting ahead, reported that it looked possible. We persevered and eventually emerged onto a dual carriageway at the bottom of the hill, which took us out under the foot of the main bridge for the A2 out of Lisbon - a bridge that we knew was closed to us. However ferries also ply the same route, and apart from one near disaster caused by inadvertently straying too close to tram lines, we made it to the ferry terminal without incident and heaved a big sigh of relief.

In a footnote to the above, we met a couple of Germans in the campsite at Lagos who had come from Lisbon by bus and train. According to their guidebook, cycling in Lisbon is so dangerous that no-one attempts it. Fortunately we did not know this at the time.